The battery will be used to store solar power for a water disinfection plant.

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Off the Grid

A city in Australia has saved $1.5 million by installing a Tesla Powerpack. The battery will power a water disinfection plant, which is the first facility of its kind in Australia to be supplied with electricity in this manner.

Logan City Council recently built a new reservoir to cater to the needs of the area’s growing population, but the site was so far from the power grid that it would have been prohibitively expensive to forge a connection. Instead, 323 solar panels have been attached to the roof of the facility, harvesting energy that will be stored in the 95 kWh Powerpack.

Logan City mayor Luke Smith stated that linking the plant up to the grid would have cost $1.5 million. The council hasn’t stated how much it paid to implement the Powerpack, but the hardware is estimated to have cost around $100,000, according to a report from Electrek.

“We’ve obviously been trialling it for the last few weeks and we’re confident that it’s going to work but what it will do is it will set a new standard, I think, globally but particularly what we’re building in Logan,” Smith told ABC.

Broadly speaking, the country is ahead of the game when it comes to renewable energy, producing enough to power 70 percent of homes. As such, it should be of little surprise that officials are looking into better ways of storing that energy to make the most of production.

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